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As theatre, the last hours of the Leveson media inquiry in Britain couldn’t be faulted. Barrister David Sherborne rose to his feet to detail for one last agonising time the horrific experiences of many of his clients who had been victims of telephone hacking.

Minutes after he finished, Alison Levitt, for the Crown Prosecution Service, at a press conference across London, announced that eight people would face trial for phone hacking. Her news made headlines around the world yesterday, but what happens next is less clear.

The scope of the charges was overwhelming. A swath of the senior management of News of the World was charged with conspiring to hack the phones of more than 600 people over a six-year period.

And the names. Rebekah Brooks, until a year ago the chief executive of News International, a former editor of both News of the World and The Sun, and the woman sometimes described as Rupert Murdoch’s substitute daughter, is facing three charges, on top of charges for perverting the cause of justice laid in May.

Andy Coulson, Brooks’s successor at News of the World, and until 18 months ago the communications director for Prime Minister David Cameron, faces five charges (on top of a Scottish perjury charge from last month).

Eighteen of the 19 charges involved private investigator Glenn Mulcaire, the man whom Sherborne, at the Leveson inquiry, had just described as “the tabloid world’s guilty pleasure, a dirty secret that everyone was so quick to disown”.

Sherborne finished his address in the narrow window of opportunity before the charges were announced and the matters became sub judice, severely restricting what can be reported in Britain about hacking as Brian Leveson prepares his report.

After a year of almost daily revelations about fresh excesses by News International journalists, the story will now go silent. The question is, what next?

Sherborne had only one conclusion – there would be payback.

“Let us not be under any illusions here,” he said. “Following the end of this stage of the inquiry . . . the counter-attack will start, as will perhaps the settling of old scores.”

The investigations of police bribery have widened from News International titles to Trinity Mirror and Express Newspapers, suggesting any such counter-attack could be broad based.

But what have the headlines and revelations of the past year achieved? What has been learned?

To date (eliminating double counting), 69 people have been arrested and questioned by the police teams run by Deputy Assistant Commissioner Sue Akers.

Operation Weeting, which targets phone hacking, has arrested 16 people, of whom eight have been charged. Decisions about two more journalists are yet to be made.

Separately, seven people were arrested over allegations of perverting the course of justice. Six were charged.

Operation Elveden, targeting corrupt payments to police, prison officers and officials, has led to 41 arrests, and Operation Tuleta, targeting computer hacking and data theft that affected up to 101 people, has led to six arrests. There is a new investigation into stolen telephones.

The police investigations are widening to other newspaper groups, Akers told the Leveson inquiry on Monday. But the overwhelming majority of arrests to date have involved journalists of Murdoch’s News International.

These had been “lessons that are too severe to be forgotten, and News International is determined not to have to learn them twice”, counsel for News, Rhodri Davies, told Leveson on Tuesday.

Leveson asked Akers if he could conclude that “whatever might have happened in the past at News International titles, the senior management and corporate approach now has been to assist and come clean, from which I might be able to draw the inference that there is a change in culture, practice and approach?”

Akers told him: “Yes, sir. I don’t disagree with any of that.”

But the last days of the Leveson inquiry revealed a month-long breakdown between Akers’s investigation teams and News Corporation’s management and standards committee, run by Joel Klein.

The MSC conducted an internal review of The Sun and News of the World and passed relevant documents to police under a voluntary protocol.

These documents revealed what appeared to be corrupt payments to police, prison officials and other government officials by journalists at The Sun, which triggered a large number of arrests on January 28 and February 11. It was in the flurry of criticism that followed that the relationship between the MSC and the police changed, Akers said this week. Responses by the MSC slowed.

In late April, Murdoch appeared at the Leveson inquiry, where he testified that the MSC had uncovered all that was wrong at News International, and it didn’t involve senior management.

“Someone took charge of a cover-up, which we were victim to,” he said. “I think the senior executives were all informed, and – were all misinformed and shielded from anything that was going on there . . .”.

This can only be what Klein and the MSC lawyers had told Murdoch. So it must have been a shock when little more than two weeks later, on May 15, Rebekah Brooks, her husband Charlie Brooks and four others were charged with a cover-up, with perverting the course of justice, by removing files.

The charges appear to have coincided with a decision by News Corp to stop helping the police. Akers told Leveson this week: “In mid-May this year, following a development in our investigation, it caused the MSC to reconsider their position and they decided that they would prefer the meetings to be on a more formal basis with lawyers only.”

The document flow stopped. Two weeks later, on June 1, Anthony Grabiner and other lawyers acting for the MSC met police to discuss renewing co-operation, but it was not until June 14 that the MSC resumed providing material to the police.

Meanwhile, Klein had stepped down from running the MSC, and was replaced by News Corp’s New York counsel, Gerson Zweifach, News announced on June 18.

Akers said, “[The] co-operation continues and we have recently received a substantial amount of information.”

Here the saga becomes harder to follow. Last week, in a pre-trial hearing of a civil case against News before Geoffrey Vos in the High Court, Sherborne produced an email by a senior News executive that he said referred to phone hacking of a “well-known victim”.

The judge suggested the email could affect evidence heard by the Leveson inquiry early this year. He ordered the email and the identity of the sender remain undisclosed.

He said the email had been found during a manual search by News International lawyers, Linklaters.

However, Linklaters had forgotten to disclose the email to the civil litigants.Police told them about it only on Tuesday night last week.

Vos said he accepted Linklaters’ explanation that it had been an oversight.

“We now have an internal instruction email passing between a senior executive and a journalist relating to a well-known individual’s phone,” Sherborne told Leveson on Tuesday. “Perhaps the smoking gun we have been looking for.”

It suggests a complex context to the decision by News Corp last month to split off its newspaper division. The charges against Brooks in May had highlighted the contagion risk that criminal charges against senior News International executives posed to News Corp in the US.

It appears likely that the mystery email was not delivered to police until after the document disclosure resumed on June 14.

The decision to split newspapers off was taken barely a week later. Was it connected?

That may be all we ever know. Charges have been laid. The curtain has come down.